gettext problems (msgfmt)

[Steven Suson]

Greetings all,

    I have been rebuilding a LOT of RPM's lately, including a great many
KDE packages. In the midst of this, I noticed a problem. In the cases
where a packages source files did not include all of the .mo files, and
the build process attempted to generate the .mo files from the .po
files, this almost invariably failed. My hypothesis is that this is for
two reasons. The current msgfmt (tried the latest and greatest from
rpmfind.net, as well as that included with stock Red Hat 6.2), doesn't
like the

#, fuzzy

in the header (complains about invalid header), despite the fact that
this seems to match the info documents included with gettext (note that
the emacs lisp for po-mode, included w/ gettext validated this just fine
-> self-inconsistency). After reaching this conclusion, I deleted this
line, and ran msgfmt again. This time, it (correctly) complained that
the header information was still at default (i.e. not filled in). As
best as I can tell, this is a KTranslator problem. I've only used it a
bit (to perform rough translations), but I've never seen it fill in
those header fields...

    Has anyone else noticed this? Not being able to do the conversion
from .po to .mo is a big problem. Is it being addressed?

Thanks for your time,
Steven Suson
"Keep the faith."